Jump to full article: The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition, 2001-12-03
Author: GORDON FAIRCLOUGH / Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Intro: Earlier this year, a federal grand jury in Charlotte indicted Mr. Hammoud, fellow immigrant Said Harb and seven others on charges they conspired to smuggle millions of dollars of cigarettes and divert part of the profits to the Beirut-based terrorist group.
Mr. Harb and three other men were also charged with trying to procure specialized equipment for Hezbollah, including night-vision goggles, global-positioning systems, laser range-finders and advanced aircraft-analysis software.
Monday, a judge in the U.S. District court here is scheduled to hear arguments on a critical aspect of this closely watched case: whether the government can use wiretaps collected by Canada's intelligence agency as evidence in the defendants' criminal trial. The Charlotte case is the first big test of a 1996 law that prosecutors hope will be a major tool in Washington's legal war on terror. The law, known as the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, makes it illegal to provide funding or material aid to foreign terror groups. . .
By the mid-1990s, prosecutors say, Messrs. Hammoud and Harb were involved in a large-scale cigarette-smuggling operation that was initially discovered by a local sheriff's deputy, Bob Fromme. Mr. Fromme and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms pursued the smugglers for years as they plied the roads between North Carolina and Michigan, where they delivered their cigarettes to gas stations owned by another Lebanese immigrant.
In North Carolina, the state cigarette excise tax is just 50 cents a carton. In Michigan, it is $7.50 a carton, enabling the smugglers to pocket much of the difference, law-enforcement officials say. Between 1996 and 1999, the group funneled millions of dollars of cigarettes to Michigan, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars for themselves, according to investigators' estimates.
By the summer of 1999 -- when the ATF and the U.S. attorney's office in Charlotte were ready to seek indictments in the case -- the FBI stepped in. Agents said they had been investigating members of the smuggling ring for possible involvement with Hezbollah. FBI counterterrorism agents had been watching suspected Hezbollah members in the U.S. for years. The radical Shiite Muslim group was implicated in the 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks outside Beirut that killed 241 people, among other attacks. Three alleged Hezbollah members also are on the list of most-wanted terrorists assembled by the FBI in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Prosecutors allege that significant sums of money generated by the Charlotte group's smuggling operations were sent to Lebanon by courier and wire transfer for use by Hezbollah.
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